George Clooney: Actor, Silver Fox, Pizza Chef?

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As all men should, we totally respect George Clooney (OK, a lot), so that's why we can't help but chuckle at what's apparently his (for the sake of all that's holy, let's keep pretending it's not just an uncanny look-alike) latest obsession: making pizza in Germany. It appears evidence of this first surfaced at least a month ago (thanks, Internet!), so we know that Mr. Clooney has been fooling us all for quite some time now.

The fact is that becoming, master pizzaiolo takes lots of time and grueling training, striving for perfection. A recent San Francisco Chronicle story described the process of master pizza chef Anthony Mangieri, of Una Pizza Napoletana:

Anyone can make one great pizza; make 100 great pizzas every night, week after week, year after year, and then you start to get to a place that people can't duplicate.

"I always think of John Coltrane. I'm not comparing myself to him at all, but in a sense that it's a guy that went through many phases of his art or whatever he was doing," Mangieri says. "It's not like all of a sudden he decided to abandon chord change. He learned and built and built and then found freedom through all the learning and practice.

And one of many Italian schools, Vera Pizza Napoletana, offers a one-week American course as well, which Will Artley of Pizzeria Orso took. He then spoke to Eater about it:

Under the tutelage of at least two pizzaioli (pizza makers) for each session, he learned the history of pizza, the ingredients of a denomination of control (D.O.C.) pie and the detailed techniques to create the perfect dish. He and another chef each also churned two to four hundred pizzas a day.

"They basically critique you in every way — how you stirred, how you washed everything, the temperature you had your oven at," he says.